Scott back from Bulgaria, off to China

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By By Roland Stoy

Hillsdale.net - Hillsdale, MI

By By Roland Stoy

Posted Aug. 30, 2012 at 4:00 PM

By By Roland Stoy

Posted Aug. 30, 2012 at 4:00 PM

Coldwater, Mich.

rstoy@thedailyreporter.comCOLDWATER — When Jackie Scott was a little girl, she had an idea of what she wanted to be when she grew up.She wanted to travel the world and write about it.Circumstances have made that possible, and she recently returned home to Coldwater for a couple of weeks, in between an experience in Bulgaria and now, teaching English in China.The daughter of Branch County Veterans Affairs Director Charles Scott and Victoria is now a veteran of the Peace Corps."I am definitely ready for my next big adventure," she said when preparing to leave Bulgaria, and she left for China at the end of last week, again flying into a largely unknown situation,Jackie, 27, was born in Heidelberg, Germany, into her military family, and after the Scotts later came to Branch County, she graduated from Coldwater High School in 2003.She did her undergraduate work at Northern Illinois University, graduating in 2007, and was preparing to return there in 2008 when a gunman entered a lecture hall and killed five people before turning his gun on himself."After those shootings, I couldn’t go back to school," Scott said.She worked various jobs, including substitute teaching, and smiled in recalling she was at one point laid off from careerbuilder.com.What to do?One day, she said she had been complaining to a friend about subbing, and shared her childhood dream, and the friend said "Just do it." She turned to the Peace Corps, which turned her to Bulgaria in 2010.Scott knew nothing of Bulgaria, the last of the Soviet satellite countries to fall in 1990.Nonetheless, she went to work teaching English in the country of around 7 million, in a town of around 15,000, finding many similarities in youth there, including many students not enamored of learning. They were also children of people not used to freedom, and navigating their way while trying to become conversant with the concept of having choices.But the people were very friendly, and she feels she was successful. She is keeping in touch with some of her former students via Facebook.The initial going into the unknown was hard, Scott said, and shortly after she was there, she phoned her mother and said "I want to come home.""No you don’t," said mother, and she didn’t."We’re very, very proud of her," said Victoria.Charles said on Wednesday his daughter is settling in, in China, and "Everything seems to be going well."Scott’s bookScott’s "book" about her travels are in the form of a blog, travelingjackie.wordpress.com.